Achieving behaviour change in health through preventative steps in Hounslow

The London Borough of Hounslow

Spring 2015

The challenge

Hounslow Borough Council’s public health team wanted to take a fresh look at the interventions tackling their priority health outcomes – infants’ oral health, healthy weight in children and diabetes prevention in at risk groups – to build understanding on whether their interventions are targeted at the right behaviour with the right approach. This was a brand new piece of work not undertaken anywhere else nationally. TCC were tasked to identify priority behaviour for each health outcome, understand the context in which priority behaviour take place and make recommendations to influence future commissioning and partnership working. Alongside this the Council wanted a replicable methodology developed so the work could be undertaken independently by them in the future.

How we approached it

We combined a number of research methods to get the best result. An extensive desk review of secondary research, alongside expert interviews, was conducted to identify priority behaviour influencing the three priority health outcomes. An understanding of the priority behaviour was developed through in-depth primary research with the target groups, including in-depth interviews and diary keeping. We used the COM-B behaviour change framework to identify which interventions should be used to affect change. Through this process a bespoke, replicable, methodology was developed to allow the Council to complete the work again in future.

What happened

Workshops and meetings were delivered with Council public health teams to share and embed learning from the project. The insight from the work was directly fed into the team’s delivery and service commissioning planning process for the following year. The insight gave teams evidence with which to make commissioning decisions that will maximise intervention impact.